Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  “Yes,” I said, happy to have his arm around me where it belonged. But at dinner he sat across the table and was soon talking to the people on either side of him, a painter, or something, and a social worker. My sister is a social worker, I heard him say. He was going on happily for a long time about it. I stalled out talking to the man on my left, a businessman who ran a chain of restaurants. The lawyer on my right talked to him over my plate. I concentrated on my medallions of beef. Milo smiled at me occasionally from where he sat. We didn’t dance.

  “Did you have a good time?” he said, when we got home.

  “I did,” I said. My voice was small but he didn’t notice. His eyes were shining like a boy’s.

  “That was some crowd,” he said wonderingly. “Wasn’t it?” He sat on the bed taking the studs out of his pintucked tuxedo shirt, not really watching me as I slithered out of my dress. “It’s just so …” He was being careful. It was one of the times when he wasn’t sure whether he could say something to me.

  “What?” I said.

  “It was fun.” Which is not all of what he meant, I think. He meant: It was just so … great to be in a room full of people who were not white. A relief. A thrill. Not to be the sore thumb.

  “You didn’t talk to me,” I said.

  “I did,” he said, too quickly.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, you always take care of yourself at parties,” he said. “I saw you talking to Darryl Haynes.”

  “Yeah. Or anyway, he talked to me.”

  “See?” Milo said, and kissed me on the head. A smell of scotch and smoke came off him. He went in the bathroom to brush his teeth, talked through toothpaste and the open door. “They used to call him Hardhead Haynes. He knocked out the Panamanian Pedro Concepcion in ’76 after two minutes.”

  “I don’t like boxing.”

  “You know I was at that fight? The Concepcion fight? Montreal Olympics, 1976.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Amateurs fight with helmets and big fat gloves, and they’re only in the ring for about three minutes. I’ll never forget Darryl, though,” Milo said. “He was amateur going on star.”

  Milo had won his own medals the winter of that year. He was twenty-two. He went to Montreal on a lark. It wasn’t too far from New Hampshire, where he was visiting his parents, killing time before training camp in Chile. He had it in his mind, he said, to meet an American female track star he’d heard about named Gloria Parks. He met Darryl Haynes instead. Nineteen seventy-six was a boom year for American Olympic Boxing. Five Americans, including Sugar Ray Leonard, Leon and Michael Spinks, won medals. Darryl was the one they called the “Boxer with Brains,” because unlike most other fighters of his rank, he had spent time in college. He was a Golden Gloves champ from South Orange, New Jersey, made the Olympic team after hard training with some legendary police officer in the local gymnasium.

  Milo was all wound up that night, telling me about Darryl. “We went wild after Darryl got his medal. The two of us landed in some French-Canadian joint, drinking. Darryl speaks no French, right? So he gets me to teach him Je suis le boxeur américain, and he’s waving his medal around in the air. Voilà! voilà! There was this waitress—oh, Jesus.” He was about to tell me something, I could see the whole story going past his eyes. He shook his head, thought better of continuing. “Never mind. No. That man was wild.”

  “So why haven’t I heard of him?” I had heard of Sugar Ray Leonard, both Spinkses, but not Darryl Haynes.

  “He quit,” Milo said. “Sometime after the ’76 Games. Said it was because he wanted to finish his education … But I don’t know.” He looked skeptical when he said this, peeling off his socks. He hung up his tuxedo, put away his cuff links, talking and talking while I listened from the bed.

  There were rumors. Maybe Haynes had fixed a fight, Milo said, thrown one right after his medal, in order to arrange a big comeback, big purse, big gate. Milo said he asked Darryl about it, in the “Where Are They Now?” interview, and Darryl had gotten so pissed he made the crew stop rolling tape. “That was a shitpack of lies then, same as it is now,” he said. “And you even mention fight-fixing on your broadcast I will sue you all for libel.” Darryl told Milo, “The people who run boxing are crooked as the pathways of Hell,” and explained how a certain promoter had set him up to fight a joke, a fake white hope, somebody without hands, and I’m not going to do that! Make a spectacle! So I quit! I quit in ’77! Finished college!” He would, he told Milo, make it with brains, not brawn. He then moved to Harlem and got a degree from City College, turned up just recently as Darryl Haynes, agent and sports promoter.

  “He could have been a world champ,” Milo said. “He really had fight.”

  “He seems to be making out well for himself.”

  “He’s trying to make himself my agent,” Milo said.

  “He was telling me he understands you,” I said, “in a way maybe your agents right now can’t.”

  “Maybe,” Milo said. “But understanding is not what you usually want in an agent. What you want is killer instinct.”

  “He was a professional fighter.”

  “So you think I should go with him?”

  “Whatever you think.”

  “I think the guy’s a hustler,” Milo said.

  “You know that kid?” he said later, in the dark.

  “Kid?” I said.

  “The one with the braces,” he said. “You know what she told me?”

  How handsome you are, how important, probably. “What?”

  “She told me I was a big influence on her,” he said.

  I don’t want to hear about her. Stop talking.

  “Oh?”

  “She said she remembers when I won. In ’76. She was ten years old.”

  A lot of people remember that, Milo.

  “Some Park Avenue ballet school had just told her black girls don’t have the body type for ballet,” he said. “Can you believe that?”

  I do not want to hear any more right now about black people and what bad white people say to them and think about them. I am sick and tired of the subject and I just want you to pay attention to me.

  “How stupid and not true,” I said dutifully, down by the edge of my pillowcase.

  “Anyway, her mother pointed me out to her—when I won. Told her: ‘They said black people didn’t ski, either, but Mr. Robicheaux right there on TV is proof they were wrong.’ And now that kid—whatever her name is, Switzerland, or something, Geneva—is first in the troupe, or the corps, or whatever they call it. She wants to be a prima ballerina.”

  “All because of you,” I said sarcastically. It was two o’clock in the morning. I wanted Milo to shut up. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted him to get my hand and hold it.

  “Not all because of me,” he said. “She said I was an influence, and I just thought—”

  You just thought you would keep on yammering about this till the sun comes up. I made sleeping noises, rustled the blankets around.

  “It just means a lot to me that some kid like her noticed. At the time, I always wondered if anyone—noticed.”

  “Oh, they noticed.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked me abruptly.

  “Just. Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  “You’re completely ignoring me,” I said, and rolled with my back toward him, hip rising like a wall.

  He lay there quietly for the longest time. I was nearly gone, spinning into sleep, but waiting. Sulking. He was awake. He was rankling the bedclothes. You could tell he was thinking. The way he breathed. Then all of a sudden, he got my hipbone like a handle and pulled, flattened me out and got up over me so I had to look at him in the dim dark, the outline of his head and his sleek shoulders.

  “I am not ignoring you,” he said.

  He took my face in his hands and stared me down. He watched me even in the dark. He kissed me, got my mouth open. My lip was cut on his teeth. He reached down below the
blankets, moving my legs out of the way without waiting, fast and pretending to be angry. I’m not ignoring you, he said, I could never ignore you, so I forgot everything, every hurt feeling. I love you, he said.

  Why.

  Because I do.

  Say you do.

  You know.

  Tears. I remember them, the way the breath was caught in our chests and forced out by the weight of the other, the bones and the padding of muscle, how it felt when he pushed and I arched and pushed back. He said Lord. He kept me in his arms, under him. Milo, I said. Charlotte, he said.

  I am telling you these things, these private intimacies, which are sacred. I’d rather not tell. But these moments are evidence, the tears and the breath and what we said, of how we were. We were not some taboo liaison or some other illicit idea you may have, one that proves I deserved what was coming or that he was capable of it. We did not love each other to make some point or to show off or tempt fate. We were married. I love you, he said. It was the simplest thing, the way we felt, and it made everything else so complicated.

  21.

  Maybe I should have seen caution lights blinking at that party up in Harlem, in the fact that Milo practically avoided me. Maybe I should have seen flags for trouble in the way Darryl’s eyebrows raised and lowered, the way he registered the ring on my hand. Maybe the way Milo spoke about Geneva Johnson—his influence on her—should have rung alarms in my head. But they didn’t. Maybe he was trying to tell me something: how he always wondered if they noticed. But I think I really did understand, even then, that Milo wanted to mean something to black people, wanted so badly to be appreciated as part of a struggle. Because he had struggled, no question. He was attracted to something in that room that I could not give him.

  Still, it didn’t worry me. I didn’t doubt Milo. I wasn’t jealous. Certainly not of a girl in a smiley-face necklace. I was glad she was a dancer! Glad Milo inspired her and that she proved something to the smug Park Avenue ballet mistress! Glad she was a happy young girl! We would never see her again. She was one of the many, many people we met who loved Milo, who remembered when he won, who thought he was just so wonderful. Milo smiled at them and signed his autograph and said, Thank you very much, you flatter me. Thank you.

  Perhaps I should have been warned but I wasn’t. None of it felt threatening.

  It felt fun. Half the time I was giddy. Mrs. Milo Robicheaux. It cracked me up, to be Mrs. It sounded respectable and domesticated, as if I might abruptly begin canning tomatoes. Coming home from work, getting the mail, seeing that name on an envelope, I felt happy. All we thought about in those newlywed days was having fun. We thought about which party, which wine, what to wear. We thought about going to Wyoming versus going to Chamonix. We thought about our new duplex terraced loft on Mercer Street, which I loved so much it was embarrassing. He that trusteth in his riches shall fall, I know, but I couldn’t help it. The carved old moldings, the tin ceilings, the way the light came in the windows in the morning full of golden dust. I loved coming home, putting my key in the lock, riding the elevator, the doors closing, pushing “3.” It was only a number, but to me it had the beauty and significance of a beloved’s name. Three.

  Mrs. Milo Robicheaux. I didn’t worry about Charlotte Halsey. She was fine. She was alive and well, modeling her head off. The camera loves you, they said. Everybody wanted to make pictures of Charlotte Halsey now: Scavullo and Avedon, Casablancas and Weber.

  The camera loved Milo, too, all cameras did: film or video or still. He was headed somewhere, that’s for sure, somewhere impressive and important. He was twenty-seven years old. Rumors went around: He wouldn’t be a network sports guy much longer; he’d get his own show, maybe a film. Milo was interested in films. He had always done ads and commercials, of course. Cars, watches, stomach acid tablets, mint gum. He still did a lot of things with mint, since the Network let sports anchors sell pretty much anything but athletic equipment. Milo did a bunch of ads for a line of breath fresheners. He was always skiing in those ads, which he loved. The minty freshness. Swoosh. He’d ski up to the camera in a blitz of snow and hold the product. His teeth would flash.

  At first Milo liked this. It was all a big adventure to him. He was good at it, you could see. He was easy to work with. Coachable, is what they said about him, a director’s dream. They had said this about me, too, so I knew how it felt, for him to hear those words. Milo liked praise, but he wasn’t surprised. He was used to being good at things.

  A big chewing gum ad campaign featuring him began in late ’82, I think, and right around that time, not long after we saw him at the Dance Theatre party, Darryl Haynes started calling Milo up. “Hey, Mint Man!” Darryl teased Milo mercilessly. “Where’d you get those teeth?” he’d say. “They just love those teeth of yours!”

  And Milo would say, “You’re just jealous, Hardhead, since you lost all of yours.” Darryl had fake front teeth, since his had been knocked out boxing. But it bothered Milo, the teasing. One day he said Fuck you under his breath when he hung up the phone from talking to Darryl.

  “What?” I said.

  “Haynes,” Milo said.

  “What’d he say?” I said.

  “He’s on my case, wants to be my manager, my agent, says all this crap to me, you know, my teeth, doesn’t like the gum ad, whatever.”

  “He’s just teasing you,” I said. “You don’t like teasing, remember?”

  “Not like that I don’t.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He said my teeth made me look like—”

  “What?”

  Milo wouldn’t say but I made him. He was really bugged by it, what Darryl said: With those teeth you look just like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.

  I didn’t know who that was. Claire told me later that Al Jolson was that white guy from sixty years ago who painted his face black and put big white lips around his mouth and went around singing happy slave songs.

  “Jesus, Milo,” I said. “He’s just teasing you.”

  “The guy’s out of control.”

  He changed the subject but I think it ate at him, Darryl’s barb. Milo was under contract to do four more ads for the gum and he didn’t want to do the last two. Around that time he would come home from work or meet me at a restaurant and he seemed … restless. Cooped up.

  “This is just not what I had in mind,” he said one night.

  “Me?” I said. We were at some new gorgeous restaurant, for our first wedding anniversary. The air smelled of butter and wine. Milo was looking out of sorts. “The place?” I asked. “It’s quiet, anyway.”

  “No, not the place,” he said. “The job.”

  “The gum job?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Dumb gum job.”

  “Why is it dumb?”

  “What is not dumb about it? Hawking some product?” he said.

  “Pays well.”

  “Like we’re starving,” he said. He poked his fork at the tower of seared scallops on his plate. It toppled. “Aaaaggggghhhh,” said Milo, making a sound effect for the falling food, another one for the crash: “Crrrrrrghh!!!”

  “Like you’re dignified,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  “I just spent a day skiing down the same fucking fake slope, saying ‘Taste the minty freshness.’ It wasn’t even real snow! It was a hill in New Jersey!” He was piling up his scallops again into a tower, concentrating. “Taste the minty freshness. Fuck the minty freshness,” he said.

  He was sick of the ads, sick of sportscasting, too. “The athletes are all having more fun than I am,” he said. “Out there playing, running, crossing the finish line, diving, jumping. All I’m doing is interrogating them about it, the thrill of victory! The agony of defeat! Same story everywhere you look.” He didn’t like sitting in the dark, editing tape. It sucked, he said. It was dark and hot and smelled stale.

  And there was something else I couldn’t put my finger on. Maybe it was that Milo had no friends in town. He really didn’t. I mea
n, except me. Which I liked. But what I mean is, no one else. We went out all the time. We hung out with models and their boyfriends. Glenda, the one from Trinidad, had this white boyfriend now, Etienne, who was Belgian, and we made jokes about what we had in common, but it wasn’t true, because really, they were both … European, somehow. They didn’t get our jokes. We hung out with Claire and her nice new flame, named Tim. We were on lists, went to events where we sat next to celebrities, soap opera actors, society Hairdos and Neckties. Milo was a master of talking to them. He had his smile, his aloof reserve that turned brilliantly charming. He got along with everybody. But they weren’t friends, not like Milo was used to: VD, Winksie and the guys.

  “What about the guys at work?” I asked him. “You like them?”

  “Buncha fatsos,” he said. “Even the skinny ones. Buncha dweebs. Never broke a sweat in their lives. Hitting the search button on the raw tape is exercise for these people. They get their thrills watching, you know? Not me.” He was sorry, he said. He didn’t mean to complain.

  “I don’t want to talk about other people doing things,” he said. “I want to be the one doing them.”

  “Maybe,” I suggested, “we should just go up in the mountains and live.”

  “I’ve lived in boondocks,” he said. “I’m not interested in boondocks.”

  People told him he should do films. He thought it would be fun to try, anyway. He had meetings with Jed and Mark. They took their time about it, but finally Jed, the one I used to always call Ted, just to annoy him, got Milo a part in a movie.

  It was 1983. The film was called Slope! (Don’t ask, it sank like a stone.) It was a comedy about an American ski team sabotaged by Soviet spies. As far as I could tell it was a spoof of Help!, the Beatles film, only bad. But from the beginning, Milo was excited. Mr. Positive Attitude. “It’s small, but it’s still a start. It’s a film anyway,” he said. “Not an ad.” Just to be skiing, to get six weeks’ leave from the Network, to be up in the real mountains where he was happiest. “Beats hawking gum,” he said. He liked that he got to do some of his own stunts, which involved flipping off cliffs on skis with a fake submachine gun strapped to his waist. He liked that he was the hero of the movie. Or rather one of the heroes. There were two. Milo and this other guy, named Revo, an actor with shaggy blond hair and multiple pairs of mirrored sunglasses. In the film, Revo got the girl, of course.